Aspect orientation for composite services in the telecommunication domain

Abstract

Telecommunication network operators have specific requirements on services offered through their network, which are frequently independent of the core business logic of the service. As an example, these requirements ensure monitoring of user activities for charging purposes or allow controlling parameters that influence the quality of service. In order to satisfy these demands, services are typically tailor-made to support these supplementary features next to their core business logic. As a result, their implementation becomes tangled and specialized. This is identified as a major obstacle for efficient service composition, because more specialized services are less suitable for being reused in different contexts. This paper describes an approach to introduce concepts of aspect-oriented programming to service composition in order to keep the implementations of telecommunication-specific requirements separated from the core business function of a service. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.